Email Lists - Email Marketing Run Amok? (It Can Be Bad For Your Business)
Even if you don't have a business and don't have any interest (perhaps you do not even understand what that's), in case you have email, you've experienced the more ugly side. You have probably seen the ads for email address lists that provide thousands-or even millions-of email addresses for pocket change. Did you ever wonder how anyone could come up with a lot of addresses?
You will be certain of just one thing: when the price is affordable, these are not opt-in lists. Instead, these tremendous lists are loaded with “collected” email addresses. They're equivalent to a summary of street addresses taken in the telephone book.
Mostly, the addresses are picked from forums, student or membership lists, newsgroups, message boards, web logs, as well as other places where people gather to innocently swap information. They don't know their addresses are being gathered up and sold on the open market. And they surely did not ask to have their inboxes polluted with junk.
Harvesting email addresses isn't illegal. But it's widely considered unethical. You pay a fine or won't go to jail. Nevertheless, you can damage your company, maybe irreparably. The potential effects for violating the unwritten rule to having your company from losing your ISP blacklisted to losing your domain.